Reducing our physical footprint isn’t a prerequisite for living more intentionally; it’s more a resu

To know for sure requires some

intentional inventorying. The rechoosing process is different for everyone but no less complex, yet ultimately rewards are the same. The process of moving towards more Intentional living is to re-choose what those new essentials are now. What leaks out, and what lifts up.

The question is do all the things we still own today, have the same reason for being there as when we originally dragged them in under our roof?

That’s a question that many haven’t asked themselves in a very long time. As a result, statistics show that approximately, 48% of what most people own, no longer has any direct relevance to the life they’re currently living and absolutely no relevance to the lives they really want. What was once considered a “must have,” becomes a "must hide." yet we'll still warehouse and maintain things we'll never use again and work hard to pay for stuff we no longer care about.

We may severe physical proximity with things but often not our emotional relationship with them.

Which is why three-fourths of American households now park their cars in the driveway in front of their packed garages. It's why there is over 2.4 billion square.feet. of self-storage in the U.S. (yet 610,042 in the U.S. are homeless).

Intentional living is about changing the dynamics of that relationship. It's about having the courage to face the stuff we can't let go of but know for sure we'll never probably use ever again.

Our relationship with stuff is about as complicated as a bad marriage. If it weren’t we’d just send it packing too.

But like all complicated relationships, physically detaching is one thing, emotionally detaching is another thing entirely. Which is why 7 out of 10 American homes are drowning in clutter, and no longer even reflect the people who live in them.

In a bad relationship with people, phase one is usually a physical separation that was a long time coming, Too long. That's then followed by weeks of soul searching. Once we regain our equilibrium, the fear of living differently diminishes, and a new kind of freedom starts opening up new possibilities. We slowly start purging the house of all reminders of that person and relationship (reminders and signs of that old life). Closets get purged of their stuff, pictures of them are removed from their frames. Whether it's hurt, anger or self-defiance, those things get GONE. What stays, finally gets moved around to exactly where we really think it should have been all along...where WE want it!. Ding-dong the old life's dead. It has changed because we changed it.

The problem with the relationship with our stuff is that it’s always there in our face, all around us. It just sits there.

Or its relegated to dark places, sitting in the spaces that creep us out. We THINK it really doesn’t abuse us in any tangible way. We do our best to hide the obvious bad choices and conceal the stuff that might tag us as out of touch. We stash the stuff that we think should still have meaning, but we aren’t sure why. We hide our secrets until we can sort all that out. Of course we never do, because it’s a domino effect.

The rest of the stuff that we can explain, somewhat rationalize and still promotes the careful image that we have our act together, stays where it is. Even though it really doesn’t remotely tell our story accurately anymore, we still live with it. Our homes are now only a "dressed set" full of props from a play we once starred in, based on a script we carefully wrote and once won us rave reviews performing on.

Now the set only works when the audience is there and the lights are up and we tap dance fast enough. When we’re alone it gets a bit Sunset Boulevard, but we deal with it because it’s better than facing the truth, or dealing with the emotional baggage behind everything on that set. --Which we dutifully constructed to reflect someone we thought we were, wished we were, tried to be, but no longer are, or never were.

RightSIZING UP, is about writing a new narrative, a new script for the next act of your lives. Because what we hide in our physical life has a direct parallel to what we're emotionally stashing too.

Yes, by re-choosing the physical stuff, we're actually chipping away at the emotional baggage which has created a firewall between our outward lives and our inner GPS that allows us to continually reinvent.

Reinvention requires some thought, imagination, and clarity. It requires our inherent creativity. The very same creativity we brought with us when we came here but we can't access because somehow we lost the password. It got buried under all the mental clutter that's now physically showing up in our lives. Yep, it's true. We are how we live. Our physical clutter is simply a "tell" about our emotional apathy.

But we can use that physical clutter as a pivotal tool to not only retrace our steps back to that original creativity password. but physically and tangibly begin to uncover the past clues of who we were at our core, --at a time when we were still full of wonder and possibility.

What motivated the choice? What impulse was strong enough to actually get us up, dressed, in your cars, out into the world, and walking down the store isles.

What made us find it, committed to it, then drag it in under our roofs, which is the only way it got over the threshold. It wouldn’t be here unless, on some level, it filled a need in our life, right? So what was that need? So why is that stuff we had to have now sitting in the attic? Did we change our minds about the needs that stuff once filled? If we outgrew it, then why is it STILL there? Why are we continuing to pay for stuff that pertains only to a life we no longer care about, or wasn't really us in the first place?

RightSIZING It’s about coming clean with ourselves so our spiritual interior starts dictating our physical one. Not the other way around.

If it sounds really intense, well, it is. Which is why it's still there? Re-choosing it or purging it are the most personal decisions you’ll ever make. Is it deep? You bet. But guess what? You don’t need a shrink to delve into the murky, messy regions of your mind.

Here's the good news. We can use all that crap in our physical interiors to crack the code to our future wellbeing and begin the internal healing. But this time, from the outside in.

Because the physical interior and the mental interior always match, if we're willing to face the music, and relook closely. Attached to every single thing we own, like reading tea leaves are all the clues, right there, embedded in our physical footprint. In every item is all the emotional evidence about us that we need to chart a new path if we're willing to back up and retrace our steps object-by-object. It's something we humans should be doing all the time otherwise, why were we given complete free will then so many years in which to experiment with it?

Concealed in every physical purchase we've made, is embedded the emotional timeline of that choice too.

Each item tells an accurate piece of our story thus far. Who we were, who we thought we were, who we've tried to be, who we think you're supposed to be and though often buried, who we secretly want to be. It's all sitting there, right in plain sight.

The intentional living process is about getting the physical interior back in sync, more with the heart, and a whole lot less with the head (that's impulsively had a mighty free reign for maybe a little too long).

The first step is re-inviting the real us back to the table. The part of us, that's been living in the basement under all that physical and emotional social clutter we heaped on it, It's that part of us, that's been listening quietly from the cellar, living on fumes, while we bumbled around upstairs, preoccupied with the messiness of being appropriate.

He who travels lightest goes farthest. Are you a seasoned traveler?

If you’ve ever been on a trip with an insecure over-packer, who spent more time worried about protecting the crap, they didn’t need in the first place than enjoying the actual experience, you know what I’m talking about. If you were one of those people (or were stuck with one), you know what it felt like to be the idiot who brought “options” they never used, but got in everybody else’s way. While your fellow travelers were already on the bus with their smart little carry-ons, you were stuck in baggage claim, holding everybody up, looking for a porter to lug your steamer trunks.

RightSIZING is in its own way, psychotherapy from the outside in. But RightSIZING has you dealing with real tangible stuff versus ink blots. As you physically re-choose your new life essentials, you're actually discovering as much about you as months of couch analysis. As you progress, you see immediate physical results that motivate you as you go. You see real change both in your physical space your mental attitude and yes, even in your wallet, because a whole new math starts emerging too.

RightSIZE UP starts the look into those emotional steamer trunks, rummaging through old beliefs you automatically adopted, expectations you thought you had to meet and choices you made more for others, then for yourself. We'll help you sort through those trunks from other trips that dead ended. We'll pluck only the souvenirs and tokens that have relevance to your future journey ahead.

RightSIZE UP sets a new course by reconnecting that GPS signal so you can finally

start hearing the real you again.

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